Home What's New
Psychoanalytic Writings
Psychotherapy Service Email Forums and Groups
Process Press Links |
Robert M. Young Online Writings
EVOLUTION, BIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY FROM A MARXIST POINT OF VIEW
by Robert M. Young
Marx and Engels admired Darwins theory of evolution by natural
selection, because it provided a unified, naturalistic, materialist account of nature,
life and human nature, but they also saw it as a prime example of the penetration of
ideology into knowledge. When he first read Darwin, Marx wrote to Engels in 1860 that
although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains
the basis in natural history for our view (Marx and Engels, 1954, p. 171). He added
in 1862, It is remarkable how Darwin recognises among beasts and plants his English
society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets,
"inventions", and the Malthusian "struggle for existence" (Marx
& Engels, 1955, p. 128). Engels wrote, Darwin did not know what a bitter satire
he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free
competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest
historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. He added
that only conscious organisation of social production could lift humankind
above the animal world (Engels, 1873-86, pp. 35-6). This ambivalence has recurred throughout the history of Marxism, so no
single, unified account can be given of the Marxist approach to biology, evolution and
psychology. The linking of humanity to biology through evolution is bound to be a feature
of a theory which is based on the attempt to provide a unified, materialist account of all
that is. However, one aspect of this account is its claim that the ruling ideas of a
period are based on the ideas of the ruling class. A consequence of trying to hold both of
these ideas at once is that the critique of the ideological role of knowledge reflexively
threatens to undermine any settled basis for knowledge. This tension can be characterised
as that between dialectical and historical materialism. It is Marxisms version of
the deep, ubiquitous question of the relationship between nature and history (see, e.g.,
Schmidt, 1971, p. 49; Ollman, 1971, p. 53.)It is a consequence of this unresolved conundrum that it can be argued
that there are two main strands in the Marxist tradition, one which stresses the
penetration of ideological categories into accounts of nature and human nature, and
another which asserts that nature per se obeys laws which are dialectical. These
can be characterised as the humanistic and the diamat (for dialectical materialist)
strands. There is a third strand, positivism, wherein nominally Marxist thinkers simply
identified materialism with the contemporary state of natural science and technology and
sought to be good at them. This approach was characteristic of the Second International,
influenced communist and socialist parties well beyond 1914 and also produced the
remarkable achievements of the Soviet Union in science and technology, in particular,
nuclear weapons, satellites and other forms of military technology. A fourth
structuralist strand emerged in the 1960s. It was formalistic and led eventually to
deconstructionism, postmodernism (Theory, Culture & Society, 1988; Jameson,
1991; Docherty, 1993), extreme scepticism about grand narratives (Rorty, 1980, 1982, 1989)
and cynicism about utopian projects. This had the consequence of abandoning any serious
connection between those who trod this path and a recognisably Marxist approach or project
(Callinicos, 1989; Best and Kellner, 1991).
The founding document of the humanistic strand is Marxs The
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and its principal exponents were the
Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923) and Antonio Gramsci, who
thought deeply about the concepts of matter and nature in his Prison Notebooks ,
for example, The idea of "objective in metaphysical materialism would
appear to me an objectivity that exists even apart from man; but when one affirms that a
reality would exist even if man did not, one is either speaking metaphorically or one is
falling into a form of mysticism. We know reality only in relation to man, and since man
is historical becoming, knowledge and reality are also becoming and so is objectivity,
etc. (Gramsci, 1925-31, p. 446; cf. pp. 465-66). The central theses of this approach
are that nature is a societal category and human nature is an ensemble of social relations
(Schmidt, 1972; Berry, 1986). Lukács wrote, Nature is a societal category. That is
to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however
this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i.e.,
natures form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially
conditioned (1923, p. 234). There is an ongoing debate about whether or not this
approach embraces the findings of natural science as well (see Young, 1973, esp. pp.
241-45, 1977, 1985b; RSJ Collective, 1981) Marxism focuses on the social determinants of human nature, so much so
that many Marxists argue that there is no need for a separate discipline concerned with
the individual, since the possessive individualism at the heart of bourgeois social theory
is seen as a specific ideological product of the capitalist mode of production. This might
lead one to think that Marxists would be very active in social psychology, but this is not
the case. (but see Wexler, 1983). Critics of Soviet Marxism in its Stalinist
manifestations have accused it of seeking to destroy the individual with a crushing
collectivist conformism (Koestler, 1940; Orwell, 1949; Marcuse, 1958; Solzhenitsyn, 1973,
1975, 1978). All of this goes against the spirit of the original Marxist vision. As Marx
and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, In place of the old
bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association,
in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of
all (Marx and Engels, 1848, p. 87).The concepts of alienation, commodity fetishism, reification and false
consciousness recur throughout the Marxist tradition. In the capitalist relations of
production the worker is alienated from the means of production, the product, his or her
fellow workers and species being (Ollman, 1971). The commodity form leads to a fetishism,
whereby relations between people are treated as relations between things (Marx, 1867, pp.
163-77; see also Part 4, chs. 14, 15), and human relations are thereby reified
(thingified; Lukács, 1923, pp. 83-222). The concept of false consciousness
makes the point that peoples subjective sense of their motives and intentions are
likely for reasons of class location to be a long way from an awareness of
the objective, structural causes which determine their thought and action. A further
characteristic of most of the literature in the Marxist tradition is that it is critique;
hence, most of its views on nature and human nature are critical rather than part of a
fully worked out alternative framework of ideas..The founding document of the diamat strand is Engels Dialectics
of Nature (1873-86), and its central thesis is that the laws of nature are dialectical
and therefore take the fundamental form of thesis, antithesis and synthesis and that, in
the end, nature is what Marxists hope it is. Dialectical materialism evolved from a set of
principles laid down by Marx and Engels to a formulaic set of rules which were applied to
all forms of thought (Wetter, 1952; Jordan, 1967). I am presenting this approach in a
caricatured form, since its most dedicated exponents involved Soviet science and
technology especially biology and agriculture in ideological excesses which
were very intellectually and economically costly. In particular, the baleful influence of
T. D. Lysenko (who professed to be a disciple of the eminent breeder, I. V. Michurin and
represented his ideas and policies as Michurinism; see Michurin, 1949;
Stoletov, 1953) in the biological sciences and on crop cultivation, precluded the Soviet
Union from playing any significant part in these disciplines for decades, the very decades
in which the dramatic developments in nucleotide chemistry and x-ray crystallography led
to the discovery of the structure of DNA and the genetic alphabet (It is ironic that much
of it was inspired by the research and influence of the British Marxist crystallographer
and polymath, J. D. Bernal, several of whose students became Nobel Laureates; see
Goldsmith, 1980; Young, 1980). It would not be worth going into Lysenkos ideas here about how
plants develop and pass on their characteristics. Although not derived from Lamarckian
ideas, he stressed their affinity to the notion that acquired characteristics could be
inherited, an idea completely at odds with the basic assumptions of modern genetics.
Moreover, in Lysenkos writings plants were said to struggle and co-operate and obey
laws of heredity which were wholly discredited throughout the scientific world. The
followers of his teachings treated seeds in special ways (vernalization) and
planted them in large groups; most perished (for the sake of the others!), and the waste
was colossal. The waste of scientific talent was, too, since those who did not follow the
party line Stalin backed Lysenko, showered honours on him and made his power almost
absolute in science were sent to work camps in the Gulag Archipelago (Joravsky,
1961, 1970; Medvedev, 1969). All of Soviet biology and medicine were, indeed, affected by this gross
ideological distortion. Its assumptions appealed to the authorities, because it stressed
environmental influences and the malleability of nature. Michurinism claimed that It
is possible, with mans intervention, to force any form of animal or plant to
change more quickly and in a direction desirable to man. There opens up before man a
broad field of activity of the greatest value to him. By the time of Lysenkos
ascendency in 1948, when Stalin endorsed his ideas, the slogan the transformation of
nature became the basis of a whole programme (Lysenko, 1948; Zirkle, 1949; Graham,
1971, pp. 234, 235, 237). The claims for success of Lysenkoist procedures and ideas became
fantastic, as is evidenced from the writings of the sycophantic winner of the Stalin Prize
in 1949: Land in Bloom, by V. Safonov, which concludes by saying that Michurin
science must become the pivot of all the natural sciences, that all of science
was being reorganised in the wake of the 1948 congress. An unprecedented wave of
enthusiasm swept through the ranks of all sorts of scientists Not a small
group of scientists, but the entire country was promoting Michurin science, the science of
mans power over the land and of the transformation of the land for the benefit of
the people. It was a revolution in science (Safonov, 1951, pp. 541-2). Marxism has an ontology based on the concept of labour, expressed in
the notion of praxis. It was being applied here in the context of massive efforts at
willed change, attempting to bring a vast, fledgling capitalist country, with huge peasant
(formerly serf) population, into a leading role among nations in a hostile international
context. Stalinism tried to force nature and human nature; both turned out to be
refractory. No textbooks of genetics were published from 1938 to the early 1960s; no
genetics was taught to medical students in this period. Scientists in the West who
supported the Soviet regime, for example, J. B. S. Haldane (1948, 1949) and J. D. Bernal
(1949, 1952-3), were placed in deeply embarrassing positions (Werskey, 1978, pp. 292-304).
Attempts have been made by a later generation of Marxists to salvage something from this
debacle (Lewontin & Levins, 1976, 1985; Lecourt, 1977; Young, 1978). The lesson to be
learned from this episode is that, even though the ruling ideas of an epoch
including its deepest assumptions about nature are derived from the ideas of the
ruling class, if a regime seeks to dictate the categories of science with too much
voluntarist precision, the result will be nonsense. The Soviet physicists stood up to the
authorities and were able to deliver the knowledge, technology and weapons which made the
Soviet Union a formidable adversary, though it eventually bankrupted them.Something similar happened in Soviet psychology (Joravsky, 1989), but
the consequence was, for the most part, a choice of explanatory paradigm rather than a
distortion of scientific method. That is, the Soviet regime hit on the work of the
distinguished experimentalist I. P. Pavlov (1927; Wells, 1956) and his concept of the
conditioned reflex and made this the cornerstone of its official psychology. Once again,
the focus was on changing human nature by means of habit or repeated external stimuli,
paired through repetition with physiological processes. It could be said that there was no
psychology per se: everything had to be expressed in terms of reflexes and higher
nervous functions. The result was not so much to stifle science as to ensure that all work
was reported in the rhetoric of the official paradigm. In fact, Soviet studies of the
nervous system and of brain function produced some subtle, classical work, for example,
that of A. R. Luria on severely brain damaged patients (Luria, 1932, 1962, 1968, 1973.
1979). Western techniques of behavioural control, F. W. Taylors scientific
management of the labour process, for example, were eagerly taken up (Lenin, 1918, pp.
417-18). It could be argued that much of Soviet work discipline extending from the
school and factory to the use of psychiatry as a form of social control to the labour
camps in the Gulag Archipelago was a particularly coercive form of applied
psychology: voluntarist rhetoric about building socialism coupled with pure fear. In the theoretical versions of academic psychology two principles
predominated: learning from habit and explanation in materialist terms. These reflected
the environmentalism and belief in the plasticity of nature and human nature adopted by
the Soviets, as well as the requirement that all explanations should be expressed in terms
of materialist processes. The result was conditioned reflexes and explanation in terms of
the functions of the nervous system. Needless to say, hypothetical constructs, such as the
second signalling system, could proliferate here, just as they could in the
Wests nominally reductionist behaviorism, where hypothetical constructs
and intervening variables filled the gaps in the reductionists
explanations (U.S. Dept., 1950). On the other hand, after a period of some uncertainty,
psychoanalysis was declared anathema and was officially dead after 1930 (Roudinesco, 1990,
pp. 35-42). Aside from the object lesson of Soviet science, the Marxist ideas of
nature and human nature which are most interesting derive from Western Marxism, in
particular from the ideas of a small number of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt
School of Critical Theory and subsequent writers influenced by them (Jay, 1973). Foremost
among these were Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. One could say that they
all took as their starting point the question of how the Germans could have allowed a
fascist regime to be democratically elected and establish a dictatorship. What they had in
common, at least in the 1930s, was a profound belief in ideology as a material force in
the deepest layers of the unconscious. All were thinking within the framework of
psychoanalysis, although Marcuse was not a clinician. Reich believed that all that stood between oppressed people and a
return to a spontaneous, sexually liberated way of being was the removal of repression. He
made a searching study of how mass psychology propagated authoritarianism through the
generations and through the workplace and the family. One could say that his diagnosis was
profound, but his therapy was utopian and simplistic in the extreme. De-repression was
all. He wrote a series of excellent essays and pamphlets between 1929 and 1934 (Reich,
1972), culminating in his classic, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933).
Thereafter he became increasingly preoccupied with the idea that sexual energy or libido
took a physical form, which he called orgone, and he set out to find it, accumulate it and
increase its manifestations and benefits in people. He managed to outrage both the
psychoanalytic and the communist authorities and was expelled from both organisations.
(Orthodox psychoanalysis has never been tolerant of radicals and Marxists; see Jacoby,
1983.) Reich wandered about Europe for a time and ended up in America, where he was first
a guru in a utopian community then was arrested and imprisoned for contravening federal
regulations in the course of his research on orgone and the causes and cure of cancer. By
this time he believed that he could accumulate orgone in boxes which he sold. He died in
prison in an advanced state of paranoia. In spite of his tragic later life, Reichs
analyses of the mediations of authoritarianism in the lives and unconscious of people
remain important (I. Reich, 1969; Sharaf, 1983). On the other hand, his attempt to
construe libidinal energy as a measurable and controllable material phenomenon led to
nonsense.Marcuses most insightful writings in psychology are Eros and
Civilization: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (1955) and One Dimensional Man:
Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies (1964), He refined his
thinking in shorter essays: An Essay on Liberation (1969b) and Five Lectures (1970). Marcuse took as his starting point the classical libido theory of Freud and
accepted the dual instinct theory (which Reich rejected) of Eros and Thanatos the
struggle between loving and destructive forces in the personality. In particular, he
believed that these were genuinely instinctual, which set him apart from Reich (who only
ontologised libido) and Fromm (who was opposed to what he considered Marcuses
instinctual reductionism). Where Reich placed his faith in de-repression, Marcuse believed
that there is a deep instinctual integrity in human nature, a fundamentally rebellious
impulse which would refuse to be smashed flat by oppressive forces in capitalist
societies. He called this the great refusal. Marcuse applied his approach to
the history of capitalism and extended it to a deep critique of advanced capitalist
societies and their intellectual, scientific and social systems. In particular, he took a
number of Freudian notions and historicised them. To the reality principle, which he
considered to be universal, he added the historically contingent performance
principle, an extra requirement of conformism which is specific to a given period.
To the universal need for repression to ensure civilisation, he added the surplus
repression of authoritarian societies, with their ersatz sexual liberation in
repressive desublimation of girlie magazines and the like. This had a
counterpart in the political realm in his idea of repressive tolerance, a set
of liberal practices which had the deeper function of maintaining the status quo (Marcuse,
1969a). He also argued that mass society was eroding the role of the father and the
Freudian superego and increasingly controlling the individual directly by the media and
education. These ideas were very influential in the student movement of the 1960s in
Europe and America. Marcuses criticisms of class politics estranged him from the
organised Left, but his critique of the ideological construction of reality in advanced
capitalist society remains fresh and trenchant.Erich Fromms essays in the 1930s (1971) and his most admired
text, Fear of Freedom (1941) were, like the writings of Reich and Marcuse,
helpful in illuminating the rise of fascism and the failure of liberal democracy to stand
up to it. However, after he emigrated to America and then to Mexico, his successive books
became more and more romantic, voluntarist and open to criticism by Marxists, until
Marcuse (1969, Postscript) openly rejected his work because of its departure from the
libido theory, which distanced Fromm from the biological basis of Freudianism, and others
labelled it as romantic and idealist. However, Fromms writings gained a wide
audience, in particular, The Art of Loving (1956) and The Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness (1974). He continued to consider himself a Marxist, but his
excursions into extreme versions of Marxist humanism and romanticism took him beyond the
pale as far as most Marxists were concerned. There was a rash of Marxist psychology books and essays in the 1970s,
all attempting to demonstrate how the prevailing social forces acted by structural
causality to shape the thoughts and personalities of people. (Ingleby, 1970; Zaretsky,
1973; Schneider, 1975; Lichtman, 1982). Two writers in this genre are of particular
interest. The first, Joel Kovel, provided a history of White Racism (1970), followed by The Age of Desire (1982) and a series of increasingly sophisticated
essays (1988). Reich had been an early influence, but Kovel was more and more attracted by
Marcuse but with the added advantage of being a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He
eventually came to feel that neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis reach the deepest level of
human nature, the level of spirituality, which he felt should be salvaged from the
Judeo-Christian tradition and drew on liberation theology to supply what he considered to
be the missing level of human nature (1991).Victor Wolfenstein has made contributions to the Marxist analysis of
human nature which are, in my opinion, nonpareil. His biographical study of Malcolm X
(1981) is a profound synthesis of the unconscious and the socio-historical influences on
his mind and life, while his Psychoanalytic-Marxism (1993) is the most searching
and clear exploration of the issues involved in treating the unconscious and the
socio-economic aspects of human nature without collapsing either into the other.In Partisans in an Uncertain World: The Psychoanalysis of
Engagement, Paul Hoggett (1992) reflects of the problems posed by the failure of the
political project of left libertarianism in the 1960s and 1970s and returns to the
writings of Klein, Bion and Winnicott to re-found socialist politics on the basis of a
deeper understanding of the internal obstacles to liberation. My own Mental Space (1994)
covers similar ground but focuses on the problem of ways of thinking about mind in a
Cartesian world view based on mind-body dualism and explores the contributions of the
Kleinian tradition in psychoanalysis and group relations and Winnicotts concept of
the transitional, as compared with the reifications of neo-Freudianism. Particular
attention is paid to racism and virulent nationalism. Both of these books seek to make
explicit what we are up against in human nature individual, group and institutional
when we seek to change the world.Turning to a broader view of ideas of evolution and human nature, the
writings of Karl Figlio, Donna Haraway, along with my own, have sought to unite analyses
of the concept of nature in medicine and biology, with careful studies of how ideology
operates as a material force in the realm of theory. Figlio (1978, 1979, 1985) has
concentrated on the ideological determination of medical concepts and of disease
categories. I have focused on science and ideology in general and in the history of
evolutionary theory as it bears on ideas of human nature (1971, 1973, 1973a, 1977, 1985,
1985a, 1985b, 1992). Haraway (1989) has provided a magisterial study of the ideological
determinations of primate studies, as they construct a pedigree for the concept of
humanity and the family which suits the prevailing mores and current epochal forces in the
history of capitalism. The greatest strength of this work lies in the care and precision
with which she traces the determinations and their interrelations ideological,
economic, institutional, personal relationships, patronage, gender, government,
international relations, etc. She has gone beyond this in offering a vision of a
liberatory science, including feminism, cyborgs and a postmodern space which transcends
the current notions of scientific practice (Haraway, 1990, 1992; see also Young, 1992). The work of Figlio, Haraway and Young fall under the rubric of
social constructivism in the history, philosophy and social studies of
science, an approach which owes something to Marxism and something else to other, less
radical, approaches to knowledge, some of which are considered to be relativist about
epistemology. They have some things in common with traditional studies in these
disciplines. They have other things in common with an approach which is also socially
constructivist but concentrates on the ways in which social, economic and ideological
determinations are inscribed on human subjects. There have been several phases of this
approach. One which flourished in the 1970s threw up periodicals which explored the role
of structural causes at work in the psychology of individuals, e.g., Ideology and
Consciousness, and on to the publication of collections and monographs developing this
approach, e.g., Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (Henriques et al., 1984) and Nikolas Roses Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the
Private Self (1989). Another facet was the journal M/F, which was preoccupied
with the interrelations among masculinity/feminism, Marx/Freud. (I make no attempt to
summarise the marxist-feminist-psychoanalytic or the related Lacanian literatures (see
Mitchell, 1974; Rose, 1986; 1993; Soble, 1986; Brennan, 1989) or the developments from
Marxism to dissident sexuality (Dollimore, 1991; Giddens, 1992; Squires, 1993))A latter phase of this tendency found itself interpreting the
determinations of individuality in a deconstructionist way. In some hands, this has led to
the dissolution of any abiding sense of human nature or of the subject (Barsky, 1989;
Frosh, 1991; Giddens, 1990, 1992). This takes us to the heart of postmodernism and, in my
opinion, to pessimism and the danger of despair (Appignanesi, 1989; Young, 1989). Much of
this work has occurred under the influence of the study of language and the conceptions of
the episteme of a period and of power which have been elaborated by Michel Foucault
(Macey, 1993). Much else has been influenced by Louis Althusser in its early phase (Clarke et al., 1980) and Jacques Lacan (Macey, 1988; Roudinesco, 1990, pp. 35-58, 377-78)
in its later manifestations. It has also become increasingly bound up with the discipline
of cultural studies (Grossberg et al., 1992; During, 1993). I am not the right
person to attempt an exposition of it. Whatever else can be said of it, it is post-Marxist
and therefore outside of my remit. There is no doubt, however, that this is a path which
has been taken by many structuralist Marxists and which has led them away from
transformative politics. The main features characterising Marxist approaches to biology,
evolution and psychology are the interpenetration of natural and human categories, the
role of the environment and of social forces and the deep embedding of prevailing
ideological forces in the motivations of the human subject. The biggest problem for a
Marxist psychology is how to account for the origin and sustenance of revolutionary
insight and energy.Standing back and reflecting on Marxist approaches to the concepts of
evolution, biology and psychology in the broadest terms, the task is to reconcile the social
construction of nature and human nature as an essentially determinist idea
based on the detailed analysis of the relevant determinations, on the one hand,
with the transformative idea of praxis whereby nature and human
nature are seen as planned, willed, visionary projects an essentially voluntarist idea of revolutionary transformation, on the other. Looking more generally at Marxist
approaches to nature, science and human nature, there is much that remains to be
conceptualised. As befits a tradition committed to historicity, this is the ongoing
project of a number of periodicals: Science and Society, which began in the 1930s
and still appears; Radical Science Journal (1974-1986), renamed Science as
Culture (1987-) which also gave birth to Free Associations: Psychoanalysis, Groups,
Politics, Groups, Culture (1984-). The rise of ecological and environmental concerns
has led to new Marxist approaches to these issues: Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A
Journal of Socialist Ecology (1988); Society and Nature: The International Journal
of Political Ecology (1992). A passage from Bukharins essay in the epoch-making Soviet
collection, Science at the Cross-Roads, embodies a subtle combination of the
approaches to nature, science and human nature which are distinctively Marxist. In
particular, it illustrates how matters of psychology penetrate into the philosophies of
history, of science and of nature in Marxist theory and practice: At the present
time all scientists more or less acquainted with the facts, and all research workers,
recognise that genetically theory grew up out of practice, and that any branch of
science has, in the long run, its practical roots. From the standpoint of social
development, science or theory is the continuation of practice, but to adapt the
well-known remark of Clausewitz "by other means". The function of
science, in the sum total of the process of reproduction of social life, is the function
of orientation in the external world and in society, the function of extending and
deepening practice, increasing its effectiveness, the function of a peculiar struggle with nature, with the elemental progress of social development, with the classes
hostile to the given socio-historical order. The idea of the self-sufficient character of
science ("science for Sciences sake") is naive: it confuses the subjective
passions of the professional scientist, working in a system of profound division of
labour, in conditions of a disjointed society, in which individual social functions are
crystallised in a diversity of types, psychologies, passions (as Schiller says:
"science is a goddess, not a milch cow"), with the objective social role of this kind of activity, as an activity of vast practical importance. The fetishising of
science, as of other phenomena of social life, and the deification of the corresponding
categories is a perverted ideological reflex of a society in which the division of labour
has destroyed the visible connection between the social function, separating them out in
the consciousness of their agents as absolute and sovereign values. Yet any even
the most abstract branch of science has a quite definite vital importance in the
course of historical development. Naturally it is not a question of the direct practical importance of any individual principle e.g., in the sphere of the
theory of numbers or the doctrine of quantities, or the theory of conditioned reflexes. It
is a question of systems as a whole, of appropriate activity, of chains of
scientific truths, representing in the long run the theoretical expression of the
"struggle for existence" and the social struggle (Bukharin, 1931, pp.
19-21).A slightly abbreviated version of this essay appeared in Psychology
and Society: Radical Theory and Practice, edited by Ian Parker and Russell Spears, Pluto
Press, 1996, pp. 35-49
REFERENCES
(Place of publication is London unless otherwise specified.)
Appignanesi, Lisa, ed. (1989) Postmodernism: ICA Documents. Free Association
Books. Barsky, Robert, ed. (1989)Rethinking the Subject in Discourse, special issue of Discours
Social/Social Discourse. 2 (nos. 1 & 2).Bernal, J. D. (1949) The Biological Controversy in the Soviet Union and its
Implications, Mod. Quart. 4 (Summer): 203-17.______(1952-3) The Abdication of Science Mod. Quart. 8 (no. 1): 44-50. Berry, Christopher (1986) Human Nature. Macmillan.Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1991) Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Macmillan.Brennan, Teresa, ed. (1989) Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Routledge. Bukharin, N. I. Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical
Materialism, in Bukharinet al. (1931) Science at the Cross Roads: Papers
Presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology held in
London from June 29th to July 3rd, 1931 by the Delegates of the USSR; reprinted Cass,
1971, pp. 11-40.Callinicos, Alex (1989) Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. Polity. Clarke, Simon et al. (1980) One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the
Politics of Culture. Alison & Busby.Docherty, Thomas (1993) Postmodernism: A Reader. Harvester Wheatsheaf. During, Simon (1993) The Cultural Studies Reader. Routledge.Engels, Frederick (1873-86) The Dialectics of Nature, 3rd ed. Moscow: Progress,
1964.
Figlio, Karl (1978) 'Chlorosis and Chronic Disease in
Nineteenth-century Britain: the Social Constitution of Somatic Illness in a Capitalist
Society', Internat. J. Health Services 8: 589-617. ______ (1979) 'Sinister Medicine: A Critique of Left Approaches to
Medicine', Radical Science J. no. 9: 14-68.______ (1985) 'Medical Diagnosis, Class Dynamics, Social
Stability, in L. Levidow and R. M. Young, eds., Science, Technology and the
Labour Process: Marxist Studies, Free Association Books, Vol. 2, pp. 129-65.
Fromm, Erich (1941) Fear Of Freedom. Routledge, 1956______ (1956) The Art of Loving. N. Y.: Harper. ______ (1971) The Crisis of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Freud, Marx and Social
Psychology. Cape.______ (1974) The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Cape; reprinted
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.Frosh, Stephen (1991) Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self. Macmillan.Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Polity. ______ (1992) The Transformations of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in
Modern Societies. Polity.Goldsmith, Maurice (1980) Sage: A Life of J. D. Bernal. Hutchinson. Graham, Loren R. (1971) Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union. Allen Lane.Gramsci, Antonio (1929-35) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Lawrence
and Wishart, 1971.. Grossberg, Larry et al., eds (1992) Cultural Studies. Routledge. Haldane, J. B. S. (1948) The Lysenko Controversy, The Listener 9
Dec. ______ (1949) In Defence of Genetics, Mod. Quart. 4 (Summer):
194-202.
Haraway, Donna (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in
the World of Modern Science. Routledge. ______ (1990) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books. ______ (1992) The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics
for Inappropriate/d Others, in Grossberg et al., eds. (1992), pp. 295-337.
Henriques, Julian et al., eds. (1984) Changing the Subject: Psychology,
Social Regulation and Subjectivity. Methuen.Hoggett, Paul (1992) Partisans in an Uncertain World: The Psychoanalysis of
Engagement. Free Association Books. Ingleby, David (1970) Ideology and the Human Sciences: Some Comments on the Role
of Reification in Psychology and Psychiatry, The Human Context 2: 159-87;
reprinted in T. Patemen, ed., Counter Course: A Handbook for Course Criticism. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972, pp. 51-81.Jacoby, Russell (1983) The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the
Political Freudians. N. Y.: Basic; reprinted Chicago, 1986.Jameson, Frederic (1991) Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.Jay, Martin (1973) The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School
and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950. Little, Brown & Co. Joravsky, David (1961) Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917-1932. Routledge.______ (1970) The Lysenko Affair. Harvard.______ (1989) Russian Psychology: A Critical History. Blackwell.Jordan, Z. A. (1967) The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A Philosophical and
Sociological Analysis. Macmillan. Kovel, Joel (1970) White Racism: A Psychohistory. N. Y.: Pantheon; reprinted
Free Association Books, 1988.
______ (1982)The Age of Desire. N. Y.: Pantheon______ (1988) The Radical Spirit: Essays on Psychoanalysis and
Society. Free Association Books.______ (1991) History and Spirit. Boston: Beacon.Lecourt, Dominique (1977) Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko. New
Left Books.Lenin, Vladimir I. (1918) The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet
Government, in Selected Works. Lawrence and Wishart, 1969, pp. 401-31.Lewontin, Richard and Levins, Richard (1976) The Problem of
Lysenkoism, in H. and S. Rose, eds. The Radicalisation of Science. Macmillan,
pp. 32-64.______ (1985) The Dialectical Biologist. HarvardLichtman, Richard (1982) The Production of Desire: The Integration
of Psychoanalysis into Marxist Theory. Collier-Macmillan.Lukács, Georg (1923) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in
Marxist Dialectics. Merlin, 1971. Luria, A. R. (1932) The Nature of Human Conflicts. N. Y.: Grove,
1960.______ (1962) Higher Cortical Functions in Man. N. Y.: Basic,
1966.______ (1968) The Mind of a Mnemonist. N. Y.: Basic.______ (1973) The Working Brain. N. Y.: Basic. ______ (1979) The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet
Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Lysenko, T. D. (1948) Soviet Biology: A Report to the Lenin Academy
of Agricultural Sciences, Moscow, 1948. N. Y. International Publishers.Macey, David (1988) Lacan in Contexts. Verso.______ (1993) The Lives of Michel Foucault. Hutchinson;
reprinted Vintage.Marcuse, Herbert (1955) Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud, Boston: Beacon; 2nd ed. with a new preface, Allen Lane, 1969.______ (1964) One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of
Advanced Industrial Societies. Routledge & Kegan Paul; reprinted Ark, 1986.______ (1969a) Repressive Tolerance, in R. P. Wolff et
al., A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Cape, pp. 95-142. ______ (1969b) An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon. ______ (1970) Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia. Allen
Lane: The Penguin Press. Marx, Karl (1844) The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844. Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1961. ______ (1967) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. .Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1848) Manifesto of the
Communist Party, in The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, vol. I. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973, pp. 62-98.______ (1954) Marx and Engels on Malthus. N. Y.: International.______ (1955) Selected Correspondence. Moscow: Progress; 2nd
ed., 1965.Medvedev, Zhores A. (1969) The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko. Columbia;
reprinted N. Y.: Anchor, 1971.
Michurin, I. V. (1949) Selected Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages.Mitchell, Juliet (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism; reprinted Harmondsworth:
Penguin.Ollman, Bertell (1971) Alienation: Marxs Concept of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge. Orwell, George (1949) 1984; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970Pavlov, I. P. (1927) Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological
Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. Oxford; reprinted N. Y.: Dover, n.d.RSJ Collective (1981) Science, Technology, Medicine and the Socialist
Movement, Rad. Sci. J. no. 11: 3-72.Reich, Ilse Ollendorf (1969) Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography. N. Y.: Avon. Reich, Wilhelm (1933) The Mass Psychology of Fascism; reprinted Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1975. ______ (1972) Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929-1934. N. Y.: Vintage.Rorty, Richard (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton; reprinted
Blackwell. ______ (1982) Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays 1972-1980). Minneapolis:
Minnesota.______ (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge. Rose, Jacqueline (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Verso. ______ (1993) Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie
Klein. Blackwell. Rose, Nikolas (1990) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. Routledge.Roudinesco, Elisabeth (1990) Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in
France 1925-85. Free Association Books.Safonov, V. (1951) Land in Bloom. Moscow: Foreign Languages.Sharaf, Myron (1983) Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. Deutsch.Schmidt, Alfred (1972) The Concept of Nature in Marx. New Left Books. Schneider, Michael (1975) Neurosis and Civilization. N. Y.: Seabury.Soble, Alan (1986) Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality. Yale.Solzhenitsyn, Alexander (1974, 1975, 1978) The Gulag Archipelago, 3 vols.
Collins/Harvill; reprinted Fontana, 1974, 1976, 1978.Squires, Judith, ed. (1993) Perversity. special issue of New Formations. no.
19.Stoletov, V. N. (1953) The Fundamentals of Michurin Biology. Moscow: Foreign
Languages. Theory, Culture and Society (1988) special issue on Postmodernism. 5 (nos.
2-3). U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Public Health Service (1950) The
Central Nervous System and Behavior: Translations from the Russian Medical Literature.
Bethesda: Russian Scientific Translation Program, National Institutes of Health.Wells, Harry K. (1956) Ivan P. Pavlov: Toward a Scientific Psychology and
Psychiatry. N. Y. International; reprinted London: Lawrence & Wishart.Werskey, Gary (1978) The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British
Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s. Allen LaneWetter, Gustav (1952) Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Study of
Philosophy in the Soviet Union; revised ed. Routledge, 1958. Wexler, Philip (1983) Critical Social Psychology. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wolfenstein, Eugene V. (1981) The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black
Revolution. California; reprinted Free Association Books, 1990.______ (1993) Psychoanalytic-Marxism (Groundwork). Free Association Books. Young, Robert M. (1971) Evolutionary Biology and Ideology: The and Now: Science
Studies 1: 177-206; reprinted in W. Fuller, ed., The Biological Revolution: Social
Good or Social Evil? N. Y. Doubleday Anchor, 1972, pp. 241-82.______ (1973) The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the
Nineteenth-Century Debate on Mans Place in Nature, in Young (1985), pp.
164-248.______ (1973a) The Human Limits of Nature, in J. Benthall, ed. The
Limits of Human Nature. Allen Lane, pp. 235-74.______ (1977) Science is Social Relations, Rad. Sci. J. no.
5: 65-131______ (1978) Getting Started on Lysenkoism, Rad. Sci. J. nos. 6/7:
81-105.______ (1980) The Relevance of Bernals Questions, Rad. Sci. J. no.
10: 85-94.______ (1985) Darwins Metaphor: Natures Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge.
______ (1985a) Darwinism is Social, in D. Kohn, ed., The
Darwinian Heritage. Princeton, pp. 609-38.______ (1985b) Is Nature a Labour Process?, in L. Levidow and R. M. Young,
eds., Science, Technology and the Labour Process: Marxist Studies, vol. 2. Free
Association Books, pp. 206-32. ______ (1992) Science, Ideology and Donna Haraway, Sci. as Culture no.
15 3: 7-46.______ (1994) Mental Space. Process Press.Zirkle, Conway (1949) Death of a Science in Russia: The Fate of Genetics as
Described in Pravda and Elsewhere. Philadelphoia: Pennsylvania. Zaretsky, Eli (1973) Male Supremacy and the Unconscious, Socialist
Revolution no. 24: 7-57.
Address for correspondence: 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ
e-mail: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk
|
|